Salaysay, Kathleen B.

BSFMA4 Abstract

RED105 Christian Morality

Christian morality never inspired social justice, which is immeasurably more important than personal virtue. Not one of the greater problems of life was ever confronted by the gospel Jesus or early Christianity. It was left to pagan moralists to denounce war and slavery. It was left to Agnostic sociologists to discover that brutal material conditions would be reflected in brutality of mind, and that a low intellectual level meant infallibly for the majority of men a low moral level. Our modernconception of character and the way to improve and strengthen character has nothing in common with the moral platitudes of ancient Judaea. A discussion of some aspects of Christian morality.

Belief and Free Will Morality Theories of Moral Law Evolution and Morals Religion and Morals Ritual Morality Christian Morality Christian Morality in Practice Christian Crimes Morality and Christianity Futility of the Christian Ethic Let us put Natural Morality before Religion Belief and Free Will

Hume, in Dialogues on Natural Religion, demolished the arguments for God as a Prime Mover and as a Cosmic Designer. Darwins theory of evolution swept away all traces left of a Cosmic Designer. There was no need of it. Christians have still not noticed, or refuse to accept that they have. They prefer to stick to ancient and nowadays irrational ideas. Religious belief is not necessarily irrational. It arose to explain things, a perfectly rational activity. It is only irrational when it is clung on to even when there are better explanations. Admittedly, it is difficult to abandon beliefs that you have been brought up with, but that does not make retaining a false belief rational. When there is no basis for beliefs, other than tradition, and better established beliefs are available, it is irrational to cling to them. Converts who choose belief systems that they know are ancient and wrong can be nothing other than irrational. They have no excuse for their stubbornness other than their own emotional instability or even weakness. Those who leave one church to join another must have been insincere or hypocritical to have remained in their old church when they were unhappy with its tenets, or they are in the new one. Recently, a battery of Anglicans have left the Church of England to join the Catholic Church. Before they swapped, they presumably had serious reasons for refusing to accept a whole gamut of dogma that the Anglicans had shrugged off when it split with Catholicism, but none of it mattered compared with onewomen were not fit to serve God, and the Anglican church had rejected that particular dogma and allowed women to do it. Now, it is hard for the rational mindtrying to understand the theology of the omniscient and omnipotent loving Godto accept that this God does not want to be served by half of the human race that He supposedly made, but loving Christian folk have no such trouble. It is easier to believe that these people are wrong than to believe that a perfect being discriminates in such a way.

The virtue of science that theology lacks is that scientific beliefshypotheses and theoriesare checked against independent facts. Religion is based entirely on authoritythat of ancient and erroneous speculations, or more modern interpretations of them, but not on anything that is true now. Science proximates to the world as it is, but religion fantasizes about other unprovable and indeed non-existent worlds. It used to be fashionable for scientists to say it was possible in principle to reduce all material phenomena to physics. Religiously inclined people and critics of science seized upon this to call scientists reductionistsa serious insult meant to categorize them as people who cannot tell the difference between a dead sheep and a living one. This is quite amusingly ironic when Christians, even clever ones, cannot tell the difference between life and death at all! Scientists added the words, in principle, precisely because no scientist thinks it is possible in practice to reduce everything to physics. Scientists are the very people who, through such ideas as quantum theory, chaos theory and complexity, show that the whole is not reducible to the sum of its parts. Religious people, as dishonest today as they always have been, use the discoveries scientists make against the scientists themselves, claiming that they are the clever ones who noticed the putative contradiction. The average Christian is too ignorant and gullible to question such matters, and many who know it to be so, take the same line in defense of the omnipotent God they feel it necessary to defend. All life has purpose beginning with the aim of collecting the resources that perpetuate life. Thus, even simple life forms will seek light or heat, food and water, and will avoid dessication, darkness or coldness, excessive heat and places barren of nutrients. With the increasing complexity of life, purpose gets more complex and subtle too. Maslow has given a hierarchy of human needs which rises to complicated motivations like religious beliefs, but the lesser requirements have to be fulfilled before the higher ones can be. These motivations cannot necessarily be traced back to a simple set of initial conditions because complicated systems are non-linear and have multiple solutions some of which are astonishingly sensitive to the slightest difference in initial conditions. In principle, it might be possible to say there is a path through from initial conditions to the observed outcome, but in practice the path bifurcates so often and subject to such subtleties of conditions that it is impossible to trace it. So two identical people given apparently the same stimuli do not come up with the same outcome. This is why creatures seem to have a will of their own. Behaviorism might apply to them, but, in practice, the outcome can never be prescribed because of the complexity and chaotic nature of the responses.

Morality
God is not needed for morality. Morality is an outlook conditioned by society and held personally. Morality has little if anything to do with sexuality even though for the Christians of the world it has everything to do with it. That is their own perversion. Only when sex is brutalized is morality involved. What consenting adults do in private has nothing to do with anyone else. The basis of Christian morality is the sermon on the mount of Matthews gospel, a reading of the rules of a Jewish brotherhood, never intended to be universal. Christians claim they are universal rules yet manage to ignore them almost universally in practice. Yet, if they were taken seriously as a universal ethic of goodness, they would be an appropriate startpeople should not judge others, they should be forgiving and should not pursue enemies in hatred but rather show them kindness. As it is, they have given Christianity an unwarranted reputation for goodness. Which Christian nations, churches or people have ever practiced these precepts as inviolable God prescribed universal truths? Out of the billions of people calling themselves Christian, it is a few individual people. That is all! Rules are for children. If the reason for them is understood, people get wise, and the rules become unnecessary to them. Christianity however has never been a religion of wisdom,gnosis, but of blind pointless faith, pistis, in a supernatural reward merely for believing what the churches say you should. Having faith, no Christian needs wisdom. Yet, choosing a way to behave on the basis of the rewards, punishments or supposed love of a

supernatural father is a poor inferior to choosing the right way to behave based on knowing what is right and what is wrong. People need to be taught the concept of duty to others and the world at large, not just that some behaviors are rewarded by God and others punished. The Christian rewards are post mortem, and though no Christian will reject the reward offered, there is little indication that it alters their behavior during their real life. Criminals taught about hell, in an effort to reform them, often become religious but they rarely cease to be criminals on that account.

Theories Of Moral Law

A lot of nonsense has been written on the nature of conscience and moral law. Nothing in human history has caused and causes today as much hypocrisy. Press, literature and churches are universally and eternally concerned about public morals, usually sexual, but they display total hypocrisy in their neglect of far more important matters. Though moral and immoral actions are deeply woven into the web of religious thought, they have little connexion with religionevolution explains it simply. What then is the nature of morality? In a nutshell, what religious man calls conscience was at first the conscious inhibition of anti-social instincts. Guilt was the unease that went with it. God is the projection of conscience into the real world. When man began to see that events have causes, and to believe that the causes in Nature were spirits, he promptly made a god of thunder and lightning. And it was a great godthe sky-god, mountain-god, thunder-god of naturereligions. When the higher religions made God spiritual, they still maintained that thunder was his voice, in a special way, and lightning his weapon. Even Franklin did not destroy the belief. Today it is an act of God when lightning shatters a building; or kills innocent children. Moral law was another kind of thunder, and, being spiritual, it remained a sort of supernatural phenomenon even when man became fully civilized. Until modern times it was quite unintelligible. There was the law, no one knew why, no one knew whence, written in every mans conscience. The Maxims of Ptah-Hotep of ancient Egypt shows that even then educated men who were not priests understood that moral law was simply a human and social law of conduct. That was also the conviction of the two great moralists, Buddha and Confucius. Real speculation began with the Greeks and earnest thinking about Nature and man began amongst the Greeks, not of Athens or the homeland, but of Asia Minor. The refugees of the splendid old civilization of Crete, which was destroyed by the early barbaric Greeks about 1450 BC, went to Asia Minor, where they civilized the Greek immigrants. As these Greeks of Asia Minor were independent of the religious bigotry of the homeland, they speculated with great freedom and wonderful success, especially when they were taught the new religion of the invading Persians. They were really scientists, not philosophersphilosophers never believe in revelation, and they do not love science. Science must not touch spiritual things. They did not like the ideas of their Persian conquerors but saw that they were superior to the mythology of Greece. So they did what any self-respecting scientist would dothey secularized it! They guessed the vastness of the universe, believed in arta, atoms and evolution, and made little pretense of believing in gods. Philosophers usually say that, fortunately, these mere Materialists were soon thrust aside, and the great thinkers of Athens turned to study man. It was a great misfortune, for it meant the strangling of science in its cradle. Moreover, these Greek thinkers of the homeland, while they rejected current religion, as all philosophers do, were much influenced by fear of the pious democracy, and the philosophical ideas which they gave the world instead of theology are now quite discredited. First of them was the mystic Pythagoras. He is said to have been influenced by Buddhism and it is a pity that he did not introduce into Europe the Agnostic and purely humanitarian ethic of Buddha. Instead he discovered that the essence of justice is a square number. Socrates did not form any theory of morals. He merely cleared up mens ideas as to what is just, and insisted that the moral sentiment depended upon knowledge.

Plato, as a student of social life, saw that moral law is utilitarian. It is social law, enforced for the good of society. But Plato also had a theory that a merely material world can produce nothing, and all truth, goodness, and beauty must come from a spiritual world or, as he said, a world of ideasnot ideas in the mind of man, but self-existing entities. The good was one of these ideas, and conscience was its voice and interpreter. Aristotle, the most learned and logical of the Greek thinkers, did not believe in Platos ideas. No one sensible does today. But, although Aristotle wrote the first treatise on ethics, the science of morality, he did not succeed in understanding the nature of moral law, and he has left us no theory of it. In Greece there were three main opinions. There was the Platonic theory and Christian writers followed it later, saying that the ideas were in the mind of God. Then there was the theory of the Stoics and some others. Although the Stoics talked politely about the gods, it is clear that they did not believe in them. For them moral law was just the Law of Natureorder (arta). It existed. It was part of the scheme of things. A man was at discord with nature if he did not observe it. The third theory was the modern theory. Democritus first discovered the object and origin of moral law was simply concern for human welfare. Hedonists said that the test of a moral act was whether it promoted happiness, the Greek of which is hedone. Some made happiness consist mainly in pleasure. Epicurus, the last and sanest of the Greeks, though his views are nearly always misrepresented and slandered, said that moral acts were those which promoted a passionless tranquillity of life. Epicurus built on science, not philosophy, and tried to bring the world back to science. But Greece fell, and the whole tradition of independent thinking perished. The Romans were engineers but poor thinkers, and most of them followed the Stoics or the Epicureans whose humanitarian ideas did magnificent work for the world. During the next thirteen or fourteen centuries moral law was simply held to be a divine command. When at last the deistic movement attacked revelation, old ideas were revived. Some followed the Stoic theory, that moral law is the Law of Nature. Some connected it with the divine will, as revealed, not in a bible but in mans conscience. But Hobbes and Locke more or less brought out its human significance and already some satirized it as a superstition. There are two main views. One is the old idea that moral law is a sort of eternal and august reality, either in Nature or in God or in a mystic world which nobody can understand. It is seen directly by the mind, and so these theories are known as Intuitionalism. Against this, some British thinkers held that moral law is a human law regulating the welfare or utility of social life. These are called Utilitarians. Science scattered the philosophers right and left, proving the Utilitarians right.

Evolution And Morals

In the mind of all men was a sense of moral law. Men might defy it, but they did not deny it, and it did not come from revelation, since it was just as strong among civilized people beyond the range of Christianity, or before the Christian Era. It had to be explained. Some of the Greeks and the Deists could see how closely this law was related to the social interests of man. Justice, truthfulness and self-control are desirable social qualities, but parts of the law, like sexual purity, seemed to have no social significance, and how did even the law of justice, however useful it was, come into existence? The law was taken as existing apart from man, and sensed by him through a special faculty which he called his conscience. The entire situation was changed when the truth of evolution was proved. Evolution said that the human race had been evolving, from early humanity to the civilized level, over hundreds of thousands of years. This meant, first, that the law may have arisen amongst, or had been formulated by, human beings themselves long before historic civilizations arose. This would explain how the ancient civilizations found themselves in possession of the moral code, and could not suppose that it was drawn up by men. If they themselves had not formulated it, who had?

This question would have been answered ages ago if the theory of evolution sketched by the first Greek scientists, had been retained and developed. Then the Greeks might have learned how all their religious and moral and political ideas had been gradually forged in the workshop of experience, by a long line of developing ancestors. Evolution lit up the whole problem, and nearly every other problem. Evolution also suggests that primitive societies of men in the world today are examples of the stages of evolution through which the human race has passed. Circumstances drove one group onward and kept other groups behind, at various stages of development. If this is true, every stage in the evolution of moral ideas and conscience might be found in the innumerable primitive tribes scattered over the earth. But philosophers had no reason to suppose savages could throw any light on the problem. Kant was tremendously impressed with the imperiousness of conscience. There are no ifs about the moral impulse. But the simple answer is not God but that men had, largely under the influence of religion, actually forgotten that it was themselves that laid down the law, and why it laid down the law! It had become a peremptory command, enforced by education. Evolution has made all this mysticism superfluous, and it is the only explanation of moral law in which you can put any confidence, because it is the only theory which takes into account all the facts of moral life. There is no intuition whatever of an august and eternal law, and the less God is brought into connexion with these pitiful blunders and often monstrous perversions of the moral sense the better. What we see is just mans mind in possession of the idea that his conduct must be regulated by law, and clumsily working out the correct application of that idea as his intelligence grows and his social life becomes more complex. It is not a question of the mind of the savage imperfectly seeing the law. It is a plain case of the ideas of the savage reflecting and changing with his environment and the interests of his priests. Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. And so on. It would be a remarkable coincidence if this mystic law of the philosophers and the theologians, existing before man existed, and surviving when he disappears, just happened to agree so well with the social interests of the observers of the law themselves!

Religion And Morals

Neither the origin of religion nor of morality can be clearly noted in history. They rise gradually, with a long dawn. Peoples who do not even believe in spiritsand there are somehave no religion, and at what point belief in the shadow as a spirit becomes religion no one can say. Equally, the most primitive peoples have nothing corresponding to conscience or a conscious code of conduct, but they more or less have one. At a higher level of emergence they are conscious of a code, but it is explained as custom. At a still higher level, the spirits of the dead have become just as interested as the living community in the observance of the code. Religion and morality arose independently, from quite different roots, and they remained independent for some time, but enter into combination. In evolutionary theory, the ancestor of the higher is found at the earlier, lower level. Morality and religion gradually blended. The second element of the evolution of religion, the deification of the more striking parts of Nature, which gave religion its great gods, was much slower in blending with morality. These big spirits did wonderful things, and were admired at a distance, but there was always a tendency in some of them to become moral deities, because they could do so much harm or withhold so much good. The moon, a popular early god or goddess, did no particular good or harm. But the sun was a terrible tyrant in the tropics. The sky might cause a drought by refusing rain or might send thunder and lightning. The water-god might cause floods. The fire-god burned houses. The wind-god sent destructive hurricanes. Chiefly, however, it was the deified ancestors, not the nature-gods, who were concerned with the observance of custom. They had made the customs. They took an interest in them. Even great gods of historic religions, like the

Osiris of the Egyptians, are believed to have been ancestors. The Romans deified their Emperors. The Christians deified Christ, and the later Buddhists made a god of Buddha. Now in the blending of tribes into kingdoms, when rival priesthoods had to adjust their deities, ancestor-gods often fused with old nature-gods. Osiris was blended with an old sun-god. These wise deified old ancestors were particularly interested in proper conduct, and Osiris became in time the judge of the dead. The wicked were seen to flourish in this life. So, the priests said they will get their just deserts in the nextwhich happens to be a good deal longer. So we find nature-gods turning ethical. Even Jupiter or Zeus was a guardian of justice. He was a sky god, the dispenser of rain and sunshine, the fathers of all men.

Ritual Morality
Loutishness is not a primitive quality of man. At the most primitive level man is peaceful and honest to others within a clan. Tribal organization and hunting involve conflicts about encroachments on another tribes territory. Conflicts lead to wars. The tribe, in self-defense, wants fierce and ruthless warriors. Savagery becomes a social quality in maintaining the tribal prestige. Spies and prisoners must be tortured and killed. The world begins to run with blood, and conscience, the interpreter of custom and the interests of the tribe, sanctions it all. Yet they remain noble to each other within the tribe! Perhaps our modern tribes are too big, but it is this internal respect for each other that has broken down today. External conflict is still acceptable. It is only inhibited by its huge expense and the possibility of mutual destruction Or again perhaps it is the huge lack of equality that causes social breakdown. Men accumulate property, then other men steal it. In tribal society, the communal wealth was essentially communally held. A prestigious man might have a prettily carved stick or a lucky spear, but essentially he otherwise only has his prestigeand that must have been deserved. His neighbors therefore do not want to steal, have no real need to steal and in a relatively narrow community could hardly expect to get away with it if he did steal. Huge inequalities of wealth in a vast society makes the thief noble as a Robin Hood providing a social need by redistributing unfairly apportioned wealth. Or perhaps it is the growth of superstition that makes people dishonest. With the growth of Animism, certain objects are believed to have medicine or manu or some supernatural force, that is inherent. A man cannot make it, so he steals it. Then, as justice is still slow and imperfect, the victim retaliates. Murder gets more common, and leads to blood-feuds, all over the earth. Revenge becomes a terrible and legitimate passion. Religious myths makes things worse. The spirit of the murdered man has to be appeased. The murderer must die, if he can be found. If not, somebody belonging to him must die. Some would kill the murderers wife, child or best friend, not the murderer, in the belief that it inflicted more pain. Others would kill the first man they met. Others would kill the first animal they met. The spirits or gods, who are gradually credited with concern for conduct, are the counterparts of living men. Heaven is always a feeble reflexion of earthof the hunting grounds of the Indian, the harem of the Asiatic potentate, the pretty cottage with flowers and the balmy wind of the typical English and the American citizen, or the cuddle in the warm, comforting bosom of Jesus desired by the born again Christian. In the early stages, the active spirits or demigods were worse than men. They were the dead raised to display the worst character of living humanity. It was a ghastly stage in the evolution of thought when this was transferred to the gods. A god wasGod still is in the Old Testament viewlike an enraged man who takes out his ire on his wife and children. In the god, the believer thinks it is just, and the priests confirm that it is. It led to human sacrifices. Somebody had to die to appease them. The larger the number of victims, the more the gods would smile. That is why the victims were ripped open in Mexico. In ancient Europe and nearly all over the earth the gods altars stank with human blood. Reform never came from the priests, but human advancement led to some curious modifications of this. In Peru, where the priests wanted the blood of children for the sacrament, they were in the end only permitted to punch the

childrens noses. In ancient Rome, dolls were strung on little trees at mid-winter instead of the old human sacrifices. In China, paper images of men were burned. Elsewhere, animals were substituted for men, but there was a peculiar development in the scapegoat. Misfortune began to be treated as an unpleasant commodity that could be handed to others. The ritual that did it is described as apotropaic. That was, in part, the meaning of the human sacrifice. And as the gods wanted something good, not any shabby old thing, kings and kings sons and daughters had to die. This, in conjunction with another idea which we see elsewhere, led to sons of God taking the sins of the world upon themselves. But every variety of scapegoat is known. The Jews (Lev 16) believed they could unload the sins of the people upon a goat, which was driven into the wilderness. The Maoris transferred their annual accumulation of sins to a fern, which floated on the river out to sea. The Badagas of India prefer a calf, which is driven into the jungle to be eaten by the lucky tiger. The Egyptians chose a bull. The Iroquois Indians transferred all the sins of the tribe once a year to a white dog, which they burned. The Peruvians washed their sins off in the river, as the Hindus do in the Ganges today, and Christians do in church fonts. Where there was only a dim idea about the future life, the prosperity of the wicked was always a terrible problem. Why Shamash, or Jupiter, or Zeus, or Yehouah, permitted so much injustice, no one could say. The Babylonians, Romans, Greeks, and Jews mainly had no idealized thoughts of the life beyond the grave. The Indo-Europeans invented hell, though the sinful soul was only tortured for three days before being extinguished forever. The everlasting torture of hell was invented by the Christians, possibly in errora misunderstanding. They certainly took it to the utmost of scary levels. Christian kings were pretty brutal but it is hardly surprising when the Christian God could arrange for sinners to be roasted by devils in a hot oven while being kept alive all the time to feel the pain. If it was all right for God, it had to be all right for Gods faithful, the ones He would save. So they took to starting the roasting while the sinners were alive on earth. Another aberration of the moral sense under the influence of superstition was cannibalism. No doubt it was sometimes due to economic pressure as the killing of the aged often is, but mostly it was sacramental. The strength or virtue of the eaten man passed to the eater. Like much ancient religious theology, it was a primitive scientific theory. It seemed sensible that the qualities of the food passed to the eater. This led to the common religious practice of eating the god, or communion. It united the body of the God with the body of the believer, though it is not clear why it has to be repeated daily, or even weekly. The menstrual trouble of women was one human characteristic which made for the restriction of sex. They were periodically unclean. In childbirth, the superior male thought, they were again unclean. All sorts of taboos grew up, and the sex act began to be thought of with suspicion, notably for those who wanted to be particularly holy. Priests and priestesses were forbidden it. Sacred seasons were not to be contaminated with it. Out of it all arose, also, the contempt of woman, of which Egypt and Babylon knew nothing.

Christian Morality
Revelation of a holier law broke gradually upon this world. God made himself known to one or two peoples of his holy prophets and bade them purify the conscience of the world. Stumbling man was taken by the hand and led. Well that is what the prophets of the revelation told us and the priests who set themselves up to reveal the theophany to others. What are be the greatest moral innovations of Christ and Christianity? The first is the Golden Rule. Let us take it humanly. Nobody is ever going to love his neighbor as be loves himself. It cant be done. It is simply not natural because it is contrary to evolution. Human emotions are not made that way. An ideal ought to be something that can be realized. The Golden Rule of life expressed thus is a quotation from the Old Testament: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. It is not a Christian contribution to the pretty sentiments of moralists. It was centuries old when Christ quoted it.

And as the Old Testament, in its earliest form, was written only late in the fifth century BC, its doctrine of brotherly love is more than a century later than that of Buddha. Moreover, Buddha meant universal love. Every man was not the Jews brother, or his neighbor The Jews never even professed to love anybody but Jews, and they hated quite a lot of those. Buddha, as any work on him will tell you, demanded that every man should love his fellows as a mother loves her childrenthese were his words. Act toward others as you would have them act toward youan admirable principle. It puts the Utilitarian theory of morality in a nutshell. It is so obvious a rule of social life that one is not surprised that few ever said it. It is not profound. It is common sense. If you do not want lies told you, dont tell them. If you want just, honorable, kindly, brotherly treatment, get it by reciprocity. The famous and Agnostic Chinese moralist Confucius gave the Golden Rule six hundred years before Christ was born, and nearly two hundred years before the Old Testament was written. The Christian has been taught to say Confucius only taught the Golden Rule in a negative form: Do not unto others what you do not want them to do to you. The Christian missionary and Chinese scholar, Dr Legge writing about Confucius in an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, wrote: It has been said that he only gave the rule in a negative form, but he understood it in its positive and most comprehensive form. What of the counsel to love even ones enemiesdid any moralist in the world ever urge such a refinement of virtue before Christ? Loving enemies would be bad social policy. It would encourage the mean and unfair to do as they liked with no fear of recompense. The Old Testament says: Thou shalt not hate thy brother. Since Jesus was plainly a member of a brotherhood, this will have been his own teaching, especially as he wanted to unite a force of Jews against the Roman oppressors. The great Chinese sage, Lao-tse, a contemporary of Confucius, said: Recompense injury with kindness. This doctrine seems to have been common in the humanitarian ethic of China. Later, in the fourth century BC, we find the chief disciple of Confucius, the great moralist Mencius, who seems to have been the first in the world to condemn war, saying: A benevolent man does not lay up anger, nor cherish resentment against his brother, but only regards him with affection and love. There in the heart of agnostic China, three hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, you have the practical doctrine of loving your enemies as a commonplace of humanitarian morality. Buddha in India taught: Hatred ceases by love, This is an old rule. It seems to have been as common in India centuries before Christ as it was in China. TheLaws of Manu, compiled early in the Christian Era but consisting of ancient Hindu writings, says: Against an angry man let him not in return show anger. Let him bless when he is cursed.

Non-Christian European moralistsSocrates and Plato, Seneca, Pliny, Epictetus and Marcus Aureliusall had the same sentiment. Socrates, quoted approvingly by Plato, said: We ought not to retaliate, or render evil for evil to anyone. Plato and Aristotle taught the Greeks that the punishment of a criminal was a moral medicine meant as a deterrent. Penalties are to deter transgressions, not as punishment. Despite their love of enemies, Christianity, preferred the concept of punishment. So it remained until humanitarian Rationalists, most of them Agnostics, won reforms in the nineteenth century. Seneca wrote a whole treatise on anger condemning it in every form. When Greek influence began to be felt in Judaea, as we see in Ecclesiastics and Proverbs, the same sentiment was reproduced. Leviticus, the book of Jewish priestly law, has: Thou shalt not hate thy brother. Here is a sentiment, which thousands of Christian writers have claimed to be entirely original in Christ, actually found to be a commonplace of moralists for hundreds of years before Christ and in the Pagan world. Christians should note the way they are misled to falsely glorify their son of God. Candidly, how much does a Christian know about Epictetus or Apollonius, about Confucius, Lao-tse, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus, Dion Chrysostom, Seneca, or Spinoza? They are certain Christ was nobler than all put together, but they have never heard of most of them and have never read other than a few disparaging Christian remarks about any of them. How does the little that anyone pretends to know about the historic Jesus make him superior to these? It occurred to no Christian, not even to Christ, that, if loving ones enemies is lofty, it ought above all to apply to God. On what principle must Christ as man love his enemies, and Christ as God devise for them an eternity of fiendish torment? Despite the injunction to love enemies, the priests and princes of Christendom saw that God was held to burn the transgressors of his law. Since they were Gods representatives on earth, they took it on themselves to begin the toasting process without, however, the benefits of Gods judgement. By definition, those who incurred their wrath incurred the wrath of God and were therefore candidates for the grill.

Christian Morality in Practice

The world, once it had been compelled to accept the gospels, sank rapidly into the Dark Ages, when vice and violence ruled Europe. That Christianity elevated civilization is another myth of the Churches. Europe sank far lower than it had been in pagan days. The preacher distracts attention from this broad failure of Christian morality by enlarging upon the multitudes of saints and martyrs that it inspired. It inspired a large number of forgeries of saints and martyrs. Martyrs were created by the hundred by the corrupt Roman writers of the early Middle Ages. During the fifteen hundred years of Christian domination, thousands of men and women found real inspiration in the gospels, but this is minute compared with the countless millions whose lives throughout the whole of that vast period were made hopeless and miserable by the obsessions of the Church. Why was the teaching of Jesus so ineffective? It was not just the fault of the Church of Rome, because there was no improvement after the Reformation. England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost as immoral as during the Middle Ages. It was only in the nineteenth century, especially the latter part of the nineteenth century, that the standard of taste and conduct rose to the level on which we now live. But historically the fault lay predominantly with Rome. Dense ignorance always means coarseness and the Church was responsible for the ignorance of Europe. Moreover, the ritual service, the doctrine of Purgatory and indulgences, the practice of confession, the mechanical rites of kissing relics and attending services in an unintelligible language, all tended to blunt, instead of promote, moral delicacy.

The teaching of the gospels was not even in itself calculated to help the mass of men. Jesus was an Essenian monk certain that God was ready to finish life on earth with a final holy war before bringing in perfection. Christians have tried to make a universal morality out of the instructions of a leader who thought the world was about to end for anyone who was not righteous. Right conduct is not therefore commended by Jesus to his converts for its own sake, or even because it was the wish of God, as he doubtless believed, but to get the reward of acceptance into Gods imminent kingdomor perhaps avoiding hell fire for some. The central tenets of the ethics of Jesus were: 1. Believe in the coming kingdom of God that will be open only to those that love God. This was to be a renovated incorruptible world free of sinthis world, not some other place! 2. Repent, be baptized and remain righteous, for by doing so you show that you love God, and had a chance of being considered for entry in Gods eternal kingdom. 3. Be pure of heart, so that there will be no temptation into unrighteousness that might mean exclusion from Gods kingdom after repentance. 4. Love your follow Jew. The idea of turning the other cheek is to prevent escalation of incidents between Jews, so that they would not fight among themselves, prevent their unity against the common enemy of gentiles and heathen, and thereby spoil their chances of getting into Gods kingdom. It did not include nonJews. 5. Be humble, the practice of the Essenes recommended to Jesuss followers again to keep them from getting vaunted ideas that might cause dissent, and make them ready to accept leadership. Such ascetic exaggerations as are attributed to Jesus were not in those days confined to militant monks. Wandering moralists as well as Egyptian and Palestinian monks said them. Wealthy men like Seneca, emperors like Marcus Aurelius, said them, as well as slaves like Epictetus. Philosophers like Plato and Zeno and Plutarch were little less ascetic in their denunciations of the flesh and its lusts. But all moral rhetoric of this kind is bound to be ineffective with the mass of mankind, even if they were facing the situation Jesus and his followers thought they were facing. Buddha was not more successful in Asia, on this side, than Plato was in Greece or Jesus in later Europe. Our blood is as much a part of our nature as is our reason. We feel the falseness of a philosophy or an ethic that belittles the pleasure of life and would condemn us, in a world of sunshine and flowers, to close our eyes to the light and color. Only men and women of a peculiar nature ever pay implicit attention to such counsels. The teaching of Jesus was condemned to futility by its own exaggerations. It is not too hard for human nature but human nature healthily refuses to be ruled by it. The Churches dare not in our age consistently advocate their Christian ethic. It is a condemnation, root and branch, of all pleasure. An ethic which puts married folk on a lower level, as weaklings who cannot scale the heights of superiority, has no place in the twentieth century. An ethic that preaches that a man must embrace poverty if he would be really virtuous dare not be urged from any pulpit in America. An ethic that bids the really just man turn the other cheek to the smiter is not lofty or sublime, but a sheer blunder. And these things are essential parts of Christs morality, however little they may be obtruded in Christian morality. Finally, the entire atmosphere of the morality of Jesus in the gospels unfits it for use in modern times. Efforts have been made to explain away the belief in hell of the prophet of Nazarethridiculous efforts to get rid of the plain meaning of the Greek words used in the gospelsbut no amount of ingenuity will explain away his belief that the end of the world was near. This is one of the few doctrines we can safely attribute to Jesus himself, not to the compilers of the gospels. For the source of that belief we must look toward Persia, not the Greek world. It falsifies the entire conception of human life and duty, and makes the morality of the gospels quite unsuitable for our time. In the light of that belief we can easily understand the ascetic exaggerations of the sayings of Jesus, and we can just as easily understand how it was that Christian morality never inspired social justice, which is immeasurably more important than personal virtue. Not one of the greater problems of life was ever confronted by the gospel Jesus or early Christianity. It was left to pagan moralists to denounce war and slavery. It was left to Agnostic sociologists to discover that brutal material conditions would be reflected in brutality of mind, and that a low intellectual level meant infallibly for the majority of men a low moral level. Our modern conception of

character and the way to improve and strengthen character has nothing in common with the moral platitudes of ancient Judaea. Our conception of rights has nothing in common with an ethic framed in the belief that God would soon destroy the earth by fire and summon the souls of all men before his throne. In all our rebellions there is one sound note. We claim a freedom restricted only by the rights of others that we shall not hurt them. The alternative to that would be anarchy. The character of our age is that it is increasingly social, and only a social ethic will meet its needs. Let the platitudes of the gospels slumber in the Greek books in which they were written. Let us cast aside the monkish morality of long ago. Now our universe extends to infinity not to just beyond the cloisters. Should we reject knowledge that no other age ever possessed in favor of errors held by everyone in history. We should need no moralists of old times to tell us how to behave.

Christian Crimes
Christians claim they are generally more moral than non-Christians. In some minor senses, that might at times have been true, and might still be true in that the few deeply committed Christians that there are probably lead exemplary lives compared with the average. The history of Christianity is, however, hardly a testimony to the general proposition. The crimes committed by Christians in the name of Christianity are innumerable and singularly disgusting, but Christians expunge them from their memories, if they ever learn about them in the fantasy world they are brought up in. Some dismiss them as peculiarities of the age, or the society, and not of Christianity, even though the age and society were dominated by Christianity, the very reason why the crimes could even be committed in their complete degradation. It is an explanation that suffices for Christians but ought not to for anyone who considers themselves human and compassionate. Christianity claims it makes people better than the common herd. It saves them! But in many historical instances, it has failed, not in minor ways but in major and undoubtedly unforgivable ways. For the pope to appeal for forgiveness for these crimes insults the victims of whom there were countless numbers, but for the pope they are dead and can be dismissed with a Hail Mary. Religion is allegedly the cure for the problems of crime in our loutish societies but religious people lead murderous vendettas against others in the name of their god. Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland happily leave their churches after hearing sermons in which their God advocates love your enemies and turn the other cheek and cause riots, bombing and mayhem among the Christians of the opposite camp whom they count as devils. Prelates condemn it as quietly as possible in public, but never publicly expel these monsters from their churches or pass them over to the authorities as terrorists, not being sufficiently convinced of the benefits of the balmy place that they go to when their evil sheep assassinate them. The behavior of these people should warn anyone tempted to convert to one or other branch of this dishonorable religion not to bother. And what of the Christian people of a pious disposition, who are good because of Jesus, or the commandments, or any other theological consideration? In the parable of the Good Samaritan, was the Samaritan more or less moral if he acted on religious principles rather than natural compassion or a sense of duty to another living creature? To have a sense of what is right and proper and to act on it must be better than to feel obliged to act in a particular way to get a reward, or even just to impress a god. Devout Christians might often be good but the are not good for the best reasons. Certainly some people have been motivated to important social reforms through Christianity, but Christianity as an institution has a poor record of social change. Quite the opposite, Christianity has always been a massive force of conservatism. Individual reformers have acted in spite of the church and against it. The churches have condoned or favored vile institutions like slavery for millennia. There is too much that is wicked in the history of Christianity and Christians to convince anyone who is discerning that Christianity is essentially good.

Pope Innocent III could see nothing wrong in allowing the Catholic Inquisition to use torture, nor to murder whole regions of people who were Cathars. He considered himself moral! When Protestantism arose, it also immediately took to torturing witches. The modern Protestant leader of the mightiest country in the world has bombed innocent people in Iraq, really out of revenge for the twin towers atrocity, blamed on Moslems as a whole, but nominally because the US leadership have changed their minds about a puppet dictator that they put in power when it suited them, and now they want out. A god might choose to experience torture Himself to be able to demonstrate that He understands the human condition, but to instruct His chief apostles on earth to murder and torture others is not the act of a loving god. It is an expression of the Hebrew god of the Jewish scriptures. What is hard to understand is how a believer in a supposed loving and compassionate god who has deliberately suffered Himself could declare that torture was not only not wicked in itself but was Gods will! Any human being has only to think about torture for a moment to reject it, and that is exactly why torture is described as inhuman, and torturers as themselves inhuman. How can the leader of the religion of a loving god, or even the secular, but personally religious, leader of the free world, justify in theology what is plainly a wicked deed even considered as a secular act? The answer then as now must be that Christians have no regard for the world we live in or the life in it. Theologically, for Christians, the world is defined as wicked, and so anything can be justified in it, even the worst crimes. Christianity is also intolerant, and its intolerance is justified by its view of the wickedness of the world. Those with opposite or even just different views from a Christian are described as blinded by pride or vanity or even Satan, as though Christians could not possibly be, and certainly not Christianity! For this reason, Christians appeal to infidels to look at the claims of Christianity without prejudice, by which they mean that all critical faculties have to be suspended, because it is the critical faculties that are controlled by devils or simple vanity. What without prejudice really means is like a Christian and people can only do it by being Christian. Christians frequently suspend their own critical faculties, and think others should do so too, but that is the Christian lobster pot. Enter it and you are trapped. Pretend that what is wrong is right and you will come to believe it. It must be so, because so many Christians do. In truth, it is wrong to pretend there is another life after death, and that Christians were right to murder countless numbers of people in defense of it.

Morality and Christianity

Religion is necessary, they tell us, for personal morality, but what precisely is necessary? All that the 30,000 various Christians sects agree upon is that religion is necessary. What good is it to tell someone who is sick that they need medicine, but 30,000 groups of doctors cannot agree on what it should be. Each group thinks they know and revile the diagnosis of the others. A moral but secular outlookthe Stoic, the Epicurean, the Confucian, or the pure Buddhistwhich ignored gods has been as effective as any religion. It is time advocates of religion were all told in robust language that we want neither gods nor Christs nor priests nor hells. We can manage our own business without any of them. That is the way to shut them up. Clergymen crudely and hypocritically pick out a few saints inspired by an imagined love of God and the the illusion of a reward in heaven, and urge the majority of us to be like them. Yet what an amiable minority might enjoy is not sufficient reason to foist it on to the majority unless it is meant to be a punishment for being wicked. No Christian society has been morally superior to the modern largely secular society. The Middle Ages were coarse, miserable, violent and immoral, not least among the clergy. The world has slowly improved in proportion to the decay of religion. The churches have become ethical table tennis and tea societies, still claiming that they stand for religion. Clerical writers dare not write about the state of morals in Christendom from the fifth to the nineteenth century, but parrot the cry that morality needs the support of the Christian religion. The morals of Europe disappeared when it became Christian and were still feeble when the decay of religion began in the nineteenth century. While Christianity made a moral mess of Europe, the Moslem Moors in Spain proved culture was an inspiration of honor, justice, and refinement.

Anyone honestly seeking the causes of the advance in morals since the Middle Ages would rule out religion. Religion has less influence now than it ever had. The millions who do not go to church or read the bible may or may not have a belief in God, but, if they have, it is feeble and unpracticed. Education is the principal cause of the advance, yet the modern Prime Minister of the UK wants to institute more church schools. Better and wiser education should not omit moral training but it should not be religious. The positive cause of the advance was the influence of a minority of lay writers and thinkers, most of whom had no religion, or thought out human problems independently of it. Why are immoral people immoral? The clergy answer with bizarre ideas unrelated to reality. For them, morality is a law, but people today are less inclined to recognize any god-given laws, and more inclined to ask whether He set any. The moral tradition of a society was handed down from parents to children because they saw its value, but now many parents do not and cannot be bothered any more. It is a social problem not anything to do with religion, and well-enforced laws might help to keep it, but they will be the laws of society not the laws of God. What the clergy and professing Christians cannot see is that Gods law was the law of a society. It was laid down by kings for their subjects to obey but laid down in the name of God. In ancient society when people were more ignorant and superstitious, a law of God meant something serious. It must have done because God set up a king to enforce it! Religious and ethical people also always insist that the divine code of conduct is equal in authority in every line. This leads them to be like the Pharisees that their own holy book supposedly criticizes, yet they are utterly blind to it. If a scribe had miswritten that people must enter church wearing a cat instead of a hat, you can bet your life there would be a sect of Christianity that wore cats to church, and they would be accusing the League for the Defense of Domestic Animals that they were attacking peoples right to practise their religion. Moralists distinguish between social virtueshabits such as justice, honesty, truthfulness, from which all of us would profit if they were generally cultivatedand self-regarding virtues and habits which affect no one but oneself. More liberal-minded believers and agnostics think some shade of asceticism highly respectable and, in some strange way, conducive to wisdom. Qualities or modes of conduct and character which are highly desirable to increase the amenities of life can be cultivated without any talk about eternal laws, and gods and devils. The police will look after grosser breaches of the social virtues, if they are kept from corruption, and a fairer distribution of wealth will reduce crime, while education, public opinion, and better parenting will secure what does not concern the police. Let children be taught in schooland their parents too, if needs bewhy conduct necessarily has limitations in a social group, and it will be found more profitable than telling them about the myth of gentle Jesus. Drunkenness was never a moral problem for the church. A hundred years ago, the majority of men who could afford it got drunk habitually, and the clergy had little to say about it. In Catholic moral theology, drunkenness is a venial (light) offense unless a man loses the use of reason in a bestial manner, and even this principle has never been applied strictly. All the fuss about the immorality of drink, which would have astounded priests when all the world was Christian, has originated in our skeptical age. Those who exceed occasionally, with no damage to anybody except their own head and stomach, may well tell the moralist to mind his own business. Roman Catholics of distinction have these occasional binges and stoutly maintain that neither church nor state has anything to do with the matter. In vino veritas shows what is wrong with us today. People have no desire for self control when drunk, and express their inner prejudices openly. That says something about society not about drinking. Racist attacks under the influence of drink are no less racist attacks, and that is a far more dangerous and anti-social crime than mere drunkenness.

Futility Of The Christian Ethic

Christians believe because they want to, not because they have any evidence for what they believe in. They use evidence dishonestly, knowing it is irrelevant to their beliefs and is meant to be misapprehended by those who hear it, so that they take it to be sufficiently proof of Christian beliefs and are persuaded to be baptized. Thereafter, the evidence, which was spurious to begin with is rejected in favor of simple faith, except when another victim is espied! The appearance of rationality and offering of spurious evidence is just a worm to catch an eel. The popular assumption that religion is the guardian of morality is shown by the presence usually on any panel or committee raised to discuss moral issues of prominent spokespeople for the churches, usually men.

Even people who do not practice Christianity have been persuaded that the Christian God is a moral God. They say that their God is the God of love, but also claim He has been revealing Himself for the past four thousand years through the history of His Chosen People, the Jews, who for some reason God has also arranged to be called Hebrews, Israelites, and these days Israelis. The sacred scriptures of these Jews contain their history which is also now part of the sacred corpus of Christian writings. Besides not being able to decide what to call His Chosen People, the Hebrew God, also abandoned them in favor of the Christians when the Jews carried out His plan of Salvation for humanity and murdered His son, as they were intended to do. This God sounds none too certain of what He is doing or where He is going. Curiously, in the sacred Jewish history, the moral and loving God, claimed now by the Christians, is a vindictive megalomaniac ready to arrange for genocide or to incite His Chosen People to it to get His own way. He demands that women and children of defeated nations should all be murdered, and the domestic animals too. In one case He allows that virgins can be spared for the pleasure of the victorious males of the Chosen People. He kills off armies of myriads of people and even accepts the sacrifice of a mans young daughter. An English clergyman declined to read certain psalms in church because they referred to dashing the heads of little children on the stones. These psalms were written late in the history of Judaea. The English congregation rose in wrathThese are the Word of God, doncha know?! Nothing miraculous or new or puzzling happened when Christ appeared. The stream of natural moral perversion by religions just flowed on. These are not the sort of examples that responsible parents ought to give their children, and usually they do not give them them, so that many people brought up in Christian homes, but lacking the motivation to read the holy works for themselves, grow to adulthood without realizing that their God is anything but loving. The whole of the Old Testament, the Christian name for the Jewish scriptures, testifies to the brutality and savagery of this loving and moral God. He proves by His own acts and orders to His People that His own commandments are not to be taken seriously. Thou shalt not kill, one of them says, so God and Christians continuously murder whoever they deem to be enemies throughout history! Christians ignore all this because for them it is far worse for a god to be sexually immoral, and this one shows no interest in human women until He decides upon one called the Virgin Mary whom he impregnates by taking the form of the Holy Spirit, and, so we are led to believe, entering her through her ear. For Christians, this is sufficiently removed from normal ways of penetrating women not to count. Zeus was altogether less tasteful in performing tricks like entering Alcmene in a three night orgy of sexuality by taking on the appearance of her husband. The result in both cases was the same. The human maiden gave birth to a superhero. Mind you, earlier in the saga of the Chosen People, the Christian God has shown a fondness for the genitalia of old women. He was inclined to open their wombs at an age normally past that of childbearing. Greek gods were more healthily fond of nubile maidens, like the Virgin Mary, who was, incidentally, only twelve at the time that God entered her by whatever means it was. Anyway, it is impossible for Jews, Christians or Moslems to claim that this God is beyond reproach in moral matters. The history that they call sacred shows otherwise. Some Christians try to persuade us that Christian practice is necessary to understanding, so time has to be spent reading the bible, praying, attending church services and above all converting others. Anyone doing this willingly is already a Christian, so they require belief or such a large degree of it in the first place that it cannot be a prerequisite of it. A Christian habit is to suborn language. Christian theological language most often sounds meaningless. It is! Admittedly it is not a random noise. It is not entirely without meaning because it uses words, and is not obviously about something like stamp collecting, Nature study or space engineering, but it most often has no discernible meaning. To speak of Christ means to keep silent. To keep silent about Christ means to speak. When the church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed. These are said to be the profound words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Christian, eventually murdered by the Nazis, but they do not obviously mean anything. What is incomprehensible is not necessarily profound. Sometimes

it is just nonsense. If to speak of Christ meant to keep silent, Christianity would be a lot more acceptable than it is. The worst aspect of Christianity is the constant missionizing by earnest zombies who left their brains behind in their afterbirth. To have kept the religion as a private one would have kept it where it belongs among the brain dead and the brainless. Proselytizing should not be necessary for neophytes of the omnipotent Most High God, because any such god urgently wanting to save people could find direct methods of doing it. God such as He is evidently does not want to trouble us, but Christian cracked pots do. Let them proclaim Christ through their silence, then the rest of us can get some peace. This, though, is obviously not what it means, so what does it mean? Sense and nonsense form a continuous spectrum, and much of Christian theology falls at the nonsensical end of it. That allows clever theologians to waste their time explaining in depth what is essentially meaningless anyway. It is a perfect example of the Emperors New Clothes. Christians have to pretend it means something to them. The Christian God is really the set of moral values that Christians prefer. Modern liberal Christians cannot accept that the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland are directed by the same good God that they themselves worship. Yet the Hebrew God directed the Israelites to do such things, so have they got the right god? Perhaps these liberal Christians would prefer to reject the Old Testament all together. They are doing what all Christians dothey pick and choose what they like amid a mass of contradictory options. They make God in their own image as humanity always does, and lo! He enshrines their own moral values. The trouble with religions of the book like the patriarchal religions is that ancient images of God are perpetuated, meaning that ancient and outdated values are perpetuated. The Christian God is called the living God but the petrification of belief in an ancient book is the opposite of living, and causes unnecessary and unnecessarily ungodly conflict between traditionalists and reformers. A set of beliefs constituting a world outlook should be truly living by being tied in with Nature itself, so that it can evolve.

Let us put Natural Morality before Religion

What can we conclude? Is morality derived from religion? Jeff Schweitzer, (Huffington Post) says, No! It is false and dangerous to assume it is. Morality is free of religion and precedes it. Only by understanding it will we create a moral society. We have forsaken our biological heritage for an imaginary idol in religion. Religious dogma has suppressed our inherent good. Western religion makes morality an insincere response to bribery and fear. Yet our morality is a necessity of our psycho social evolution. Religion has corrupted our natural warmth towards our fellows human beings, a warmth necessitated by our having adopted a social lifestyle to succeed in a world of more powerful animals. Now we need to move beyond faith to a more natural life in which we recognize our own evolutionary moral historyour biological legacy as a social being. Social living is a survival strategy whereby, by cooperating, we can survive better than by standing alone or only with our parents. M Bekoff and J Peirce (Wild Justice) have shown that morality is a suite of behaviors favored by natural selection in an animal weak alone but strong in numbers. Empathy, cooperation, honesty, trust, kindness to others, and reciprocity are characteristics common to social creatures which help them to bond, and so survive together, when they could not have done alone. Human beings are inherently moral creatures, as our pro-social nature requires. Good behavior strengthens the bonds that were essential to survival. Morality is our biological destiny, not a gift from god. Hitherto, we have thought that by calling upon god to smite our enemies we would automatically be on the right side. Our enemies think the same. This biased and divisive god of selfishness is not an appropriate guide to moral values. Why do we kid ourselves with the false hope of religion? By rejecting its false premises we free ourselves to treat each other truly as God, the core teaching of Christ that is always ignored. If we cannot treat our fellow humans as if they were God, then we have no right to life, let alone to eternal life! Life has a deeply satisfying purpose and meaning free of empty piety. We can create a life in which respect of each other liberates us from mutual fear, in which we life in harmony with our social nature, with our mutual sense of cooperative purpose, our destiny.

Abolishing religion will give us a more fulfilled life based on personal responsibility and the social morality we owe to our fellow humans, to each other! But we must accept that we are not above Nature to do it, but exist within Nature, and will do best out of it not by fighting a war with it, but by living in symbiosis with it. We have to be more humble. Our Earth is in crisis. When we see that humans are a part of Nature, not above or separate from the it, we will guard the resources that sustain us instead of exploiting them for that greed called profit. Having abolished religion, we can seek solutions to our problems free of the meddling of those who attempt to fool us into believing they have Gods ear. That is a delusion that has cost us millions of dead, and untold suffering.